How to format your references using the Plant Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Plant Biology. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Ni X. (2015) China’s research & development spend. Nature 520:S8-9.

A journal article with 2 authors

Raddick M.J., Szalay A.S. (2010) SPORE series winner. The universe online. Science (New York, NY) 329:1028–1029.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kashlinsky A., Odenwald S., Hogan C.J. (2000) Looking behind the stars. Science (New York, NY) 289:246–247.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kuzmich A., Bowen W.P., Boozer A.D., Boca A., Chou C.W., Duan L.-M., Kimble H.J. (2003) Generation of nonclassical photon pairs for scalable quantum communication with atomic ensembles. Nature 423:731–734.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Valière J.-C. (2014) Acoustic Particle Velocity Measurements Using Lasers. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Kobayashi-Hillary M. (Ed) (2008) Building a Future with BRICs: The Next Decade for Offshoring. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Vives J. (2016) Decomposition of the Pricing Formula for Stochastic Volatility Models Based on Malliavin-Skorohod Type Calculus. In: Eddahbi M, Essaky EH, Vives J (eds) Statistical Methods and Applications in Insurance and Finance: CIMPA School, Marrakech and Kelaat M’gouna, Morocco, April 2013. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 103–123.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Plant Biology.

Blog post

Andrew E. (2015) What Is This Bizarre Slimy Green Creature? IFLScience

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office (1977) The Bureau of Indian Affairs Should Do More to Help Educate Indian Students. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Ramirez C. (2014) Perceived efficacy of the O*NET Skills Search Tool among individuals with high functioning autism. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Fernandez M., Pérez-Peña R., Montgomery D. (2017) For Human Cargo, Truck Door Closed Out the Light, and Life. New York Times:A1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Ni 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Raddick & Szalay 2010; Ni 2015).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Raddick & Szalay 2010)
Three or more authors: (Kuzmich et al. 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Plant Biology
Abbreviation	Plant Biol. (Stuttg.)
ISSN (print)	1435-8603
ISSN (online)	1438-8677
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Plant Science General Medicine